Critics about R82

Hello to all (and Ashley),

I start by sayin that I love C2 and I consider it a professional tool, but...

The latest releases have left me a few perplexed.

The R81 with an annoying bug in exporting. A small bug correctable with just one line of code and, for this reason, a bug that would not be there. Maybe, you should do more beta testing before releasing a version, even if it's declared "beta".

The R82 offers various fixes (good!) and a new entry: the language localization of the C2 Software (not the produced games!). I guess it needed some work to integrate this function. But: was it really necessary, at this moment, spend time to this function when there are more important things (IMHO)?

The English language is widespread, especially in information technology. I am Italian and I rarely use software in Italian. I think that a game developer has not the urgency of a development environment translated into own language (then, the Italian language is complicated and often the software is poorly translated).

In the forum there are a number of features requests for C2. Many concern lacks and other minor improvements which would be a huge help during development. For this reason, I would have preferred to see these things done first, then to think about the translation.

Please, C2 is a great product with great potential, I understand that behind there is a single developer (and this is, in my opinion, a very big problem), but try to understand what are the priorities. My personal opinion is that, at this moment, would be better to focus on bugs and incorporate features that improve the development and leave after embellishment and utility features.

Steven

Actually, based on AppStore market experiences and people's rating behaviour, I can confirm that localization IS an important issue for a surprisingly large number of actual or potential buyers. In the German AppStore, there are numerous comments from customers who state that, "I really liked this game, but since it's not in German, I only give 3 of 5 points instead of all five stars."

Moreover, I've done some localizations (from English to German) for commercial AppStore games/apps, and the developers reported substantially increased sales in the German speaking AppStore regions. This may partly have been due to the also translated AppStore descriptions, though, so it's not necessarily easy to tell which had more impact: the German AppStore blurb or the in-game localization.

I don't know whether it's "more important" than some other feature that Ashley could have added instead (it's probably a little subjective), but we don't know how much (or how little) time it took to put this in and if there could have been something "better" in its place. I get this a lot at work when we add a new feature (that took a couple of hours to put in) to our software and people are all like, "But why did you spend time on this and not on THAT feature?", with "THAT" feature something that would have taken days or weeks (and a ton more resources).

As for betas having bugs ... well, that's why they are betas. :)

Hi Mivo,

yes, localization of App/Games IS A VERY important thing... but this features actually there isn't in C2!

In the new release the localization in referred to C2 software, the possibility of translating Construct 2 software in other languages, not the App/Game produced by C2. :)

Ashley has his hands full, true. He *might* better reroute his energies, possibly true. I believe that this translation addition was an afterthought, because in the release notes he clearly states it is an unfinished feature. The bugs you encounter are nothing more than normal, and the frequent release schedule helps to prevent that they stay unsolved for a ridiculous amount of time (other game engines have bugs that are overlooked for years).

Of course the most demanding users are quick to notice the bugs, and almost immediately report them. Ashley very quickly responds and tags them as solved, usually in minutes.

Not a bad tradeoff, I'd say.

To add something to Ashley's defense, when you're head in the code all day, sometime coding something more "easy" or "light" can give you some relief... <img src="smileys/smiley2.gif" border="0" align="middle" />

I agree with stevenworks about the translation of c2. I'm also Italian and I don't want software in my language for the simple reason that when I need help I need also to translate from italian to english and hope it's the correct translation.

That being said a translation OF c2 is useless, all the forums are in english and support also, unless you plan on offering multilanguage support in the forums I don't think it will really make a difference sales wise because it opens other issues.

I too vote for a way to get application translations, that would be useful.

About bugs I don't agree, Ashley is very quick at fixing things and there are ALWAYS solutions to the bugs on the forum, I really can't complain about that.

Steven: Oh, I misunderstood, sorry about that! (Still haven't had a chance to really dive into R82). Hmm, localizing the actual software isn't necessarily a bad idea, but as 0plus1 said, everything else related to C2 is in English. Then again, it's a start.

Hello,

I don't want to critic Ashley. I think he is a big developer and I've only to learn from him...

My critic is only because I'm very satisfied to use C2 in our Company and sometime I'm sorry to see in a new C2 version features that could be released, in my opinion, in a second time when, always in my opinion, the development part of C2 should need some improvement.

I wanted to say something like this but it ended up sounding kind of harsh! I'd just like to see the editor itself get worked on a bit more..Yes all these other features are amazing and fun to have but the editor is still lacking pretty basic features found in CC (collapsing sub-events, basic usability, don't have time to type more I gotta go to work!)

I'm with stevenworks with this language thing, I'm finnish and I don't want any of my software in finnish. For exmple I don't know why google is asking me if I want to translate the page that's not in finnish. The first time I visited chrome store It was really difficult for me to know what's going on cause everything was translated into this badly written finnish. I don't know what the C2 translation thingy is, but if it's something like I described then that was my opinion for it. For C2 I would like to see the "wrap" finally turn into warp <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle" /> as I believe it's intended. I would love to be able to lock UI windows inside construct as I'm clumsy I often find myself fixing them back as they were. I think it's good to be constructive towards talented people like Ashley.

The main problem with beta releases is we need to make it clearer on the site what kind of release you're downloading and make the release notes clearer. Ideally, everyone would still be on r80.2 (the last stable release), and just a few people would be installing r81 and r82 to help testing, since they're beta releases. However because it's not very clear everyone still ended up installing r81 and r82, then we get a lot of complaints about the releases not working. The intention is it shouldn't matter if beta releases don't work at all - they're just for testing and only people willing to trial the new features at the expense of stability should be installing them. From the r80 release notes I described why this is necessary:

e do test builds ourselves before release of course, but as a small team we simply do not have the resources to test quite like hundreds of people running it on their own particular software and hardware setups with their own unique usage patterns. Real-world beta testing is incredibly important to help make Construct 2 as reliable as possible.

In other words, due to our limited resources, it's inevitable that occasionally a new release will go out and it simply won't work. It's a fact of software development: we've seen the same happen to competitors, and even companies like Microsoft and Google have to occasionally rush out updates due to problems in releases, even with teams of hundreds of dedicated testers which we don't have (unless you count beta users!). The beta releases are supposed to reduce the impact of broken releases by only having a smaller number of users interested in testing try them out and report bugs, and then the majority of users who don't want to test and just want to stick to stable builds get the releases later, after wider testing has made it more reliably proven that they work. So I apologise for confusion over the latest beta releases and I'm working with Tom to make sure the site makes it a lot clearer.

Re: translations - we started this because a large company expressed interest in selling Construct 2 in a non-English company on the condition the software could be translated. So we've fast-tracked the translation feature. If you think it's a problem that we have such a small team, this is exactly the kind of feature that could bring us to wider markets and help us grow bigger. The non-English-speaking world is at least double or triple the size of the English-speaking world. I don't think anyone has realised the irony that everyone who's expressed concern about the feature has done so in English - of course, if you already understand English well, the feature doesn't affect you at all! But what about the many users who don't understand English who find Construct 2 but don't use it because they don't understand English? They're not here to express their complaints that it's English-only. We do have broader plans to translate the site, manual etc. as well, but translation is a long and complicated project.

I know there are a lot of other feature requests - tell me about it <img src="smileys/smiley1.gif" border="0" align="middle"> There are currently about 100 items on my todo list, and if each one takes just 3 days to plan, implement and test, that's still close to a year's work alone, not including other projects, bug fixes and maintenance we have to in the mean time. However, Construct 2 has only really been developed a little over a year so far, so please be patient and bear with us: hopefully given another year we'll have everything you've been hoping for finished and released! However in the mean time we have to balance a lot of different people's interests, and I hope you trust that we're working as hard as possible to do what we can for everyone.

I'm more interested in using stable builds than betas. However, it would be nice if there was some kind of guarantee of not being being left too far behind (I'd hate to be on 80 while 103 is the latest build). For example make every 5th (or whatever) build a stable one. Since 80 is the latest stable build make 85 than 90 and so on, stable. This would also make it easy to figure out if a build is stable or beta.

I actually thought that rXX were stables and rXX.x were betas.

Hi Ashley,

I didn't know that the translation feature was for an international distribution. Well, in this case is important to implement this...

Yes, there is a few of confusion between stable and beta releases. It's not very intuitive at the first glance... Maybe it's better to have the stable release as official download and let the beta in a kind of "expert developer" website session...

I know that be the one developer in a software project is difficult because for some years I worked in a very big software alone, For this reason, I know also that it's very complicated to develop an high level software alone, even if you are the bigger developer in the planet. Maybe, you would consider some strategy to find help without investing a lot of money. For example, selecting some developers and pay them only for the contribution or with a little percentage of the selling. I think there will be some good developer that will help you for not many money (I don't know for free :) ).

Speaking about new features, I'm kind of missing things like http://www.scirra.com/forum/june-dev-poll_topic43025.html

That was fun ;)